Save game tragedies

Ever got so far in a game, then your save file corrupts? Memory card gets wiped in error? Hard drive dies? What are your worst save game tragedies, and also, did these ever make you walk away from a particular game/console?

Losing Football Manager saves can make me sulk for a whole day. It is basically a database game and when it goes bad, it goes real bad from deep within the game and loading up an earlier backup might not salvage it. We're talking about saves that you could have spent 300+ hours into.

Ugh, when I only had The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on 360, my brother accidentally overwrote my save. I was halfway through the game, and I was so upset I lost all that progress.

I sicked all goals in Tony Hawk's Project 8, and on the final challenge I landed it with 'sick' difficulty' putting me at number one. It asks you to save the game right away, and I did. It locked up while saving.

I may have S ranked the game but I don't have a save file for it. :/

About seven hours into Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, I deleted my own save. Yes, I accidentally deleted my own save. Never touched a Metal Gear game again.

my 100% ff7 save with every single materia mastered and the offspring mastered so everyone could slot max knights of round/wsummon/phoenix/some other shit .. every single obtainable item and 99x of all possible items that i could obtain , blah blah blah ... located in the furthest possible save slot from #1 .. friends brother saves over it thinking "thats saved in the gold saucer , thats not the end of thegame, therefore its not the 1 save i told them never to save over..........."

the regrind was pretty harsh i never got back to that exact level of completion ... but at that point i realized it was the journey (of grinding) and not the destination (of 100%completion / overpowerdness ) that was the most fun to me ...

In Fallout 3. I was going for all the achievements and I only need the three level 30 achievements, I was level 29 and went back to The Pitt to make ammo and as I left The Pitt during the load screen the game froze and when I turned it back on my save was corrupted and the next closest was level 21. It took me a while before I ever felt like going back.

In Final Fantasy 8, I saved as soon as I got on the Ragnarok for the first time and it's filled with monsters. There is no way off the ship except to kill everything aboard and continue the story. The problem however, is after saving into my sole single slot save, I discovered I was VASTLY under-leveled to be there, and every monster on board would kill my entire party in 1 shot. There was nothing I could do, I was caught between a dead end and a monster I had 0% chance of killing. This is probably 30-40 hours into the game.

My wife isn't a gamer but for some reason was really drawn to Fable II. There was a span of about 2-3 weeks where I'd go to play something and she'd already be on the Xbox and wouldn't relinquish control of the TV. She got ridiculously close to the end, went to save the game for the night, and as the game was saving -- BOOM, a rogue power outage hits the house. She didn't think twice about it at the time, but the next night when she went to load her game... corrupt save. She was absolutely devastated. She never had it in her to go back and play again and hasn't taken a liking to a game since.

Not for me really, but I was the "little brother who constantly deleted their saves" to my two brothers all the time.

I was doing a playthrough of God of War: Ghost of Sparta, PSP version, on Youtube on God Difficulty and right near the end of the game my save corrupted. It's nothing too drastic but still makes me sad. Haven't finished said video playthrough and I'd rather just grab a HD PVR and do the PS3 one to finish. I think I dreaded most was replaying it all the way on God Mode with the bad framerate in some of those fights.

24 hours into Final Fantasy 7 and my data got corrupted. 10 years later and I still can't bring myself to go back and play it. Another one was I was trying to get the Platinum trophy for inFamous. Finished it twice already, was going through on the hardest difficulty. I was on the second to last mission and accidentally deleted my own save. Ended up playing through the whole game 4 times.

This happened recently. My niece and I were playing Powerstone 2 on Dreamcast. All of the item unlocks were gone so all of the goofiest stuff you could pick up in regular versus mode would not show up in battle. It was a major pain in the ass to unlock originally so my heartbreak was immediate when it happened. I couldn't tell if the saved just disappeared or if old data got over written but it's gone. If I could get a Gameshark GD if would probably be possible to get all of it back.

My worst save tragedy happened around 2-3 years ago. I was moving my data from one 360 to another using a USB stick. A prompt came up that asked if I wanted to delete the stuff I moved onto the hard drive off my USB. I didn't read it carefully enough, because I selected the option that deleted both the data I moved onto my hard drive and the data on the USB stick. Why that option even existed in the first place seems really really stupid. I ended up losing a lot of important data, such as an 80 hour+ Fallout 3 play-through.

I was around 90% through LA Noire when my PS3 broke. The entire system. So I never ended up beating that game.

I made the horrible mistake of buying Ninja Gaiden Black through the 360 download service... didn't know that when you delete the game to make room, it corrupts all of your saves. Invariably.

Losing Football Manager saves can make me sulk for a whole day. It is basically a database game and when it goes bad, it goes real bad from deep within the game and loading up an earlier backup might not salvage it. We're talking about saves that you could have spent 300+ hours into.

Pretty much at the end game in Arkham Asylum, save corrupted. Never went back. Horrible stuff.

Far Cry 2 was my worst. I was totally committed to a full playthrough and it wiped my save about halfway through. I finally tried again about a year ago, but I never even got back to where I was.

Just booted up Pokemon Gold yesterday and my save is gone. There goes all the pokemon from the first two generations and a whole bunch of shiny ones to a dead battery or corruption. Unsure at this time.

Lost numerous saves on Zelda 2 for the NES. Battery was sketchy so I was lucky to keep a save for a couple days at most.

Lost a bunch of save games to old SNES final fantasy carts.

Buddy joined my game in Saints Row 3 with cheats on while I wasn't paying attention so I had to restart my trophy run.

And two whole PC's ago I lost a bunch of save games when transferring over. Hard Drive crapped out before I had a chance to back them all up. This was before cloud saves existed and USB memory sticks were common.

88 Hours into Chapter 7 of Baldur's Gate II... I did every single side quest in Act II which was like almost 30 hours. Needless to say, I was super upset.

Knowing that the saves on my Gameboy carts will eventually meet a grizzly end when the battery in them dies is a tragedy in itself.

@President_Barackbar said:

Ugh, when I only had The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on 360, my brother accidentally overwrote my save. I was halfway through the game, and I was so upset I lost all that progress.

Brother overwrote my Superstar Saga save like four different times. I know that bro feel bro.

Over 15 years ago my little sister saved over my 30 hour WILD ARMS save. ARRRRRGHHHHH

I'll never forget . . . never.

I was pretty far into Demon Soul's before my launch ps3 decided to break. I had already beaten it but I was planning on doing quite a bit more and after that I never felt like getting to that point again. Would have been nice to have had PSplus at that point.

@McGhee said:

Over 15 years ago my little sister saved over my 30 hour WILD ARMS save. ARRRRRGHHHHH

I'll never forget . . . never.

When we were kids, a friend saved over my brother's Dragon Warrior save. All he had left to do was kill the final boss.

Most recently? Losing my lvl 47 character in Skyrim (Xbox 360) shortly after completing Dawnguard, due to some save game file shenanigans. Being really excited to play Dragonborn only made the entire thing more depressing. Ugh... I dunno if I'll ever be able to work up the willpower to go through all that again. I'd done damn near every side quest and all of the Daedric stuff. And the amount of effort I put into crafting my gear and working on my alchemy... *gurgle*

I had considered just shooting through the main quest lines and doing some of the Daedric quests in an effort to get back up to speed, but the more I think about all the cool little things I'd managed to collect (and the sheer amount of time my crafting and alchemy had taken the first time around), it just didn't seem like I could manage to get to where I was again in any reasonable amount of time. I might pick the game up on PC at some point and just cheat myself back to lvl 47 with all my gear, but it still won't be the same.

As for the far flung past...

I had a friend overwrite my Pokemon Red save because he somehow didn't realize there was only one saved game slot. As upsetting as that was, at least I was more or less done with the game. I'd gotten damn near every Pokemon available and leveled dozens of them all the way up to max. I was angry for a while, but eventually realized I probably wasn't going to be playing it anymore anyway and got over it.

Lent my copy of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time to another friend, and even though there were two completely blank save slots, the genius decided he had to delete my 100% completion saved game in order to play. He also lost my OoT strategy guide and sold off my copy of Turok 2 because he "forgot it wasn't his". Needless to say I stopped lending games to people for a long damn time. Somehow I actually did bring myself to replay OoT from the beginning, and got to 100% completion again even without the guide.

But the biggest one, the Game Saves Armageddon that I still have never quite fully recovered from: My brother selling off our GameCube, PS2, and Xbox -- including all of our games and memory cards, even PS1 stuff -- for a measly $500 right before going off to college. Including my games, my controllers (hell, the entire GameCube was mine), and most importantly my memory cards. Without consulting me. I lost so many game saves that day.

While playing Splinter Cell co-op with my buddy, my saves and everything was on my USB and it all got deleted. I was at the very end of the singpleplayer and co-op. So After about a month of not playing it, I just went through on the hardest difficulty.

@Funkydupe said:

Losing Football Manager saves can make me sulk for a whole day. It is basically a database game and when it goes bad, it goes real bad from deep within the game and loading up an earlier backup might not salvage it. We're talking about saves that you could have spent 300+ hours into.

This has happened so many times for me the last 15 years it's not even funny.

Accidently pressed the wrong option on my xbox and wiped out all my saves of 4 years. Many of those games had 100hours on them. Also playing a Jrpg at the time and clocked 40 lost that too. Still have not recovered from it as I never go back to those games due to that reason.

My save in Darksiders II got corrupted not once, not twice, but three fucking times, forcing me to replay the first three acts of the game four times in a row. That was great.

I accidentally deleted a 50+ hour save for Tenchu Z. I was pretty bummed, especially since it was my own doing!

Near the end of Final Fantasy VII - Saved over it like an idiot

Almost S-Ranked Lords of Shadow - Saved over it Like an Idiot

Built an awesome tower in Minecraft with a beautiful bridge connecting it to another tower in progress far away - lost when my hard drive died. That one hurt a lot.

I have a Diablo II save that's probably 12 years old at this point stuck on a hard drive that will only work if I plug it into a tower. One day I'll get that back. I had the same thing happen to me with a Baldur's Gate II save almost ten years ago after my desktop got fired due to a power surge. Thankfully I was able to recover it later.

Oh also I lost a ton of progress on DOAX2 Y'all may laugh but you dont realize how time consuming collecting all the swimsuits are. Seriously!

This actually happened to me with Seisen no Keifu. I made it to chapter 7 one minute, and the next, for whatever reason, I was sent back to chapter 4 with all sorts of weird things, like dead units. DADDY DON'T KILL HIS SOLDIERS.

Also, I had a weird inversion with Kingdom Hearts: I played the original so damn much that the disc broke on me and wouldn't load the world selection screen. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if I didn't save in Olympus Coliseum (the smallest level in the game, by far).

every save on playstation, i bought a memory card that was huge and put all my save games on it, within about weeks it died and i lost all my playstation save games final fantasy 7 included

I ran into save trouble near the end of The second Infamous game, and found that put me back to the middle of the game. I still don't understand what I did wrong, but the game wasn't saving. I enjoyed 9/10ths of Infamous 2 though..lol.

My 5 year old son systematically deleted all of my saved game data from our Wii. I like to use that as an excuse to never play any of my Wii titles, but the truth is that I just don't care about the console or any of its games anymore.

I wanted to play through Mass Effect again before 2 came out. I was almost finished playing the game and I got stuck in an elevator with one save.

Sonic Adventure 2. All rank A's, Green Hill Unlocked. Accidentally deleted it twice and it wasn't even me who got those Rank A's.
 
Or with one time I traded my friend Pokemon Emerald and I left my prized Suicune from Pokemon Colosseum whom I'd raised to level 90 something on there. Of course he went and started a new game and saved right in front of me. Dickwad.

I got my memory mixed up somehow and erased my 35 hour save file of rogue galaxy. It really sucked having to start all over again :(

@EchoEcho said:

Most recently? Losing my lvl 47 character in Skyrim (Xbox 360) shortly after completing Dawnguard,

Damn that really sucks. I had my level 20 char bug out on me and i had to start over and i was bummed out over that. I'd be super bummed my lvl 41 char i have got screwed up

@TheRealMoot said:

Just booted up Pokemon Gold yesterday and my save is gone. There goes all the pokemon from the first two generations and a whole bunch of shiny ones to a dead battery or corruption. Unsure at this time.

I assume you mean the original Gameboy Color version. That generation of Pokemon (Gold and Silver) has battery problems in the cartridges due to how the game tracks real world time. The batteries died out about 6-7 years after the game came out, wiping saves. You can still play the game and save, but the save won't last for more than a few minutes. I recently found my old Gameboy and games and encountered the same problem with Pokemon Silver, which is how I know all this terrible information.

A friend of mine and myself were playing through final fantasy 6/3 over the summer.. we were at least 3/4ths of the way through.. when one night his uncle deleted the save on accident. We were pretty broken up about it.

when I was playing runescape, the computer didn't work. I was so blue.

My GameCube memory card died on me at one point and I lost the saves for ever GameCube game I owned (memory card was right at full.) I was completely crushed. This is when I was introduced to Action Replay because there was no way I would play any of those games again unless I had something like that.

A few of the things I lost are all my unlocks for SSB: Melee (I had just recently unlocked all the characters,) an almost completed Super Mario Sunshine save, all my WindWaker saves (one of them was me trying to do a 100% run and I was 75% of the way through the game I think) and that's all I can recall off the top of my head that really sucked.

Edit: Also had a PS2 card die on me at one point, but nothing too bad was lost as it was my second card that only had a few things on it.

i have never once had a save file corrupt on me in the 25 years I have been playing video games. :)

My original Pokemon Yellow save, in which I had gotten a Mew, was saved over by my brother when he decided he wanted to play a new game. DX

Also, I accidentally saved over my 100+ hour save of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance when I was playing a new game on a separate file.